There is a lot of argument on both sides why this was either the right or wrong thing to do. That said, the real point is the market response in what was a fraught environment due to the President returning to Twitter: U.S. equities decided that the U.S. leaving the Paris Accords was a good thing. And that was reinforced by the equities still strong performance after Friday morning’s less than bullish U.S. Employment report.

It may be more so on style than substance that President Donald Trump’s dismissal of FBI Director James Comey fails very badly. Yet, in spite of what were broadly accepted reasons for the dismissal, the disquieting manner in which so many aspects of it were handled became the ‘substance’ in terms of the lower standing of the President even within his own party; and needless to say the not-so-loyal opposition from the Democratic Party.

Major market decisions out of last week into this week seem stalled by the looming next House of Representatives vote on the Trump administration’s American Health Care Act, the fraught repeal and replacement for Obamacare. The fate of this legislation is a key indication for two key market factors flowing from Washington DC.

It is not just U.S. President Donald Trump who is being held to the standard that was set by the aggressive actions of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the opening phase of his first term in 1933. As has been true for every President since Roosevelt who has been measured by that standard (which did not exist until the first Roosevelt administration), it is a significantly unfair comparison by any measure.

It might seem a bit redundant to revisit European partisan Kool-Aid consumption after our posts of the past two weeks. Yet, there is another development outside of the previously explored persistent weakness of the Greek economy and seemingly intractable nature of its debt dilemma: the process and proposed solution to rescue Italian banks. And the weakest is the poster child for the problems not only to date, yet also how the proposed "solution" might backfire.

In my first piece of this series, I detailed some of the reasons this acquisition would benefit U.S. market structure by providing Chicago Stock Exchange with added capital to pursue new innovations and offer needed competition to the NYSE/Nasdaq/BATS oligopoly. This deal will also produce benefits that will reach people both inside and out of the financial industry. In short -- and as a lifelong Chicagoan, I’m happy to say this -- I believe this transaction will be a positive for the city of Chicago, possibly significantly.